Chronic Pain Evaluation

Chronic pain continues to challenge all touched by its impact: the patient, families, the employer, insurance companies, health care providers, and government support programs. Chronic pain and its definition are problematic due to a lack of consensus about basic definitions and inconsistencies in measurement and assessment techniques. Although considerable effort has been put into a taxonomy to help classify various pain symptoms, presently no classification system for chronic pain, musculoskeletal disorders, or back pain is uniformly used. Since pain is subjective and not directly measurable, prior assessment efforts have focused on a wide range of standard diagnoses and etiology indicators, patient self reports, physician rating scales, and psychologicalassessment tools. The forms developed in this battery standardize the assessment of all these critical areas by medical staff and patients, providing a routine measure that prevents case by case interpretations. The physician form provides a framework to obtain specific information that allows the physician to make an informed objective recommendation regarding the pain patient. This has not been available previously. As a national database of information builds, these questionnaires will be used as measures of treatment effectiveness, and a tool to compare pain treatment outcomes.